Glaukós
by Marine Kaitology
Summary: "This year, fifty of them passed the test. This year, fifty of them became Fossil Fighters. And this year, four of them became the best." But the BB Bandits aren't making it easy. Join Dina, Rupert, Todd and Pauleen on an epic quest through friendship and hardship, fish and Vivos, as they conquer evil and complain lots – not necessarily in that order. {AU. Rating pending. On hold.}
1. Wheatley

**AN: OhmeinGott I'm writing a story! I can't believe this!  
OK, I have no clue what I'm doing but I've seen other people do it so...  
****_Disclaimer: I don't own Fossil Fighters!_**

* * *

At four years old, children in the Calisteo region begin studying palaeontology. It doesn't matter who they are, or who their parents are, or what they want to do in life, when students in a preschool class reach the average age of four, their teachers start to fill their heads with dinosaurs.

It starts out simple, of course. "T-Rex was mean, it ate other dinosaurs!" and "Brontosaurus was nicer, it ate leaves!" are common lesson summaries. But by eight, many have already successfully completed their first official fossil excavations. By ten, the average Caliostean has an encyclopaedic knowledge of every Vivosaur and dinosaur in the book. And at fifteen, every last one of them takes the test.

This year, fifty of them passed the test.

This year, fifty of them became Fossil Fighters.

And this year, four of them became the best.

(That is, they would. After one of them woke up and stopped snapping at her teachers.)

"Miss Clarke?"

Through her half-lidded eyes, the "one" in question glared at the mass of teenaged girls hovering about her head, groaned, and buried her head in her arms again.

"_Miss Clarke_?"

"Absent," she mumbled. "_So_ absent."

The teacher taking attendance huffed loudly and stepped up to the tired girl's desk, rapped her on the head with his pen. "Clearly not, Miss Clarke, as you are _sitting right here_."

"Oh," drawled another girl from behind the first one, "don't mind her. She's just cranky since she broke up with her boyfriend of an entire three months yesterday."

"_Pauleen_!" roared the first, whirling around in her seat and shooting her friend a withering glare. "Who made this your business?"

Pauleen ignored her. "And between you and I, Professor Diggins, I think she may be a little bit hung—"

Faster than an ornithomimid after three Red Bulls, the first girl was out of her seat with her heaviest textbook poised over the second's head and a murderous look in her narrowed brown eyes. _I will hit you, _said the expression on her face. _I will hit you very, _very_ hard if you don't choose your words carefully._

"—up," Pauleen finished dumbly. "Hung up. On . . . schoolwork! Yeah, that's Dina. Too busy for her own good." She gave a little laugh. "Had she been as pretty and brilliant as I am, this would _so_ not be a problem, but . . . ah . . . well, you know."

"Hm," mused Professor Diggins, then resumed taking attendance. Dina could feel him drilling holes in her head with his disapproving teacher stare as she sat back down, but kept her head down. She was tired, darn it, and didn't particularly want to make eye contact with anyone in the classroom anyway. Feeling satisfied with her mental assurance to herself, she brushed a curtain of tangled orange hair in front of her face and slowly closed her eyes again.

Little did she know she'd actually fall asleep, of course. As in, real sleepage. With real _droolage_. She probably wouldn't have noticed at all had there not been another rap on her head from Diggins's pen, harder this time, and sharp cry of "Miss Clarke, for the last time, wake _up_!" (causing her to do precisely so).

_Oh my gosh, _she thought, hands flying to her face and coming away sticky with the aforementioned spittle. _Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, oh my gosh! Could this morning get any worse?_

The sound of the classroom door creaking open snapped Dina out of her reverie, only to bring her attention to the sight of the Wheatley Palaentology School for Girls's principal come striding in, suit immaculate and face bitter as always. Dina paled.

_Yes, _said the snarky side of her head, _this morning can get "any worse"._

"Girls," Headmistress Flynn began, making pointed eye contact with each one of them. Her face visibly fell when her gaze came around to Dina's perch at the back of the drafty room, wrinkling her nose at the ginger's rumpled uniform (laundry wasn't Miss Clarke's top priority), messy sidecut (neither was hair-brushing, and her ex had managed to convince her that being half bald was low maintenance anyway), and altogether disheveled appearance. "I'm terribly sorry to interrupt your class—"

"Oh, it's fine, we were still taking attendance anyway!" Professor Diggins scrambled to reassure her. Headmistress Flynn did not look like she wanted to be reassured.

"—but I come bearing exciting news," the elderly woman went on through gritted teeth. "As you may or may not be aware, it is tradition at the Wheatley Schools that first-year students kick off the year by planning and executing their own official digging expeditions."

A wave of "oohs" and "aahs" swept through the class. Headmistress Flynn allowed herself a small, smug smile. "And the planning part shall begin today. You will be spending the rest of the day in the library, doing any necessary research and ultimately deciding where you will be digging . . ."

Dina wasn't sure if the headmistress's voice trailed off or if she herself zoned out, but she did know that the prospect of fancy expeditions and fresh air wasn't nearly exciting enough to keep her awake: her eyes were closing again almost immediately. It didn't take long for her head to start sliding down towards her desk, and her fingers, interwtined with her knotted hair, began going slack. Dina felt her eyes slide out of focus . . . but her vision sharpened again at the word "pairs".

_So we'll be working with partners . . . oh, drat. _She sucked in her cheeks._ Please don't say that the pairs're already assigned!_

"We have, of course, already assigned the pairs."

_Then _pretty please_ don't say I'm with Lena!_

"Anna Heilbronner will be with Claudia Hirsch . . ."

_Please not Lena, please not Lena . . ._

(Lena was Dina's roommate.)

". . . Finch Hawkins with Camilla Nast . . ."

Please _not Lena, _please_ not Lena!_

(Lena was very annoying.)

". . . Sadie Cook with Amerine Wittman . . ."

_Pleeease not Lena?_

(Also, Dina doubted Lena knew how to say a sentence that didn't consist of the words "shut", "up", "and", "go", or "away".)

". . . Mary Shultz with Sierra Lexington-Gray . . ."

_I'll do _anything_!_

(Dina did not like Lena.)

". . . Dina Clarke with Pauleen Digadi—"

"Oh, thank th'lord!" Dina found herself exclaiming, flopping backward in theatrical relief. Headmistress Flynn eyed her quizzically.

"Is something terribly the matter, Miss Clarke?" the woman asked. "Are you feeling quite the thing?"

"N-no ma'am," the orange-haired teen stammered. "N-not at all."

"Then shut up and stay put!"

Dina did as she was told, and the principal continued her journey down the list. Lena was to be paired with Isabel Eddings, a preppy girl with a vocabulary almost as limited as her partner's. Dina didn't think she could possibly care less, despite her relief about being paired with Pauleen (or rather, _not_ being paired with Lena) – but she didn't think she'd be going back to sleep, either. As Headmistress Flynn asked for questions and vetoed Sadie Cook's plea for an option of hiring people to do the actual work part "since it's so official and all," the tired girl felt her mindset shift from ditzily cranky to something composed and professional. Mentally, she patted herself on the back. She hadn't been this calm since testing, meaning she was not only over the drama of the previous week, but also totally ready to tackle life's many challenges and overcome even the hardest homework.

"Oh, and Miss Clarke," called Headmistress Flynn on her way out the door, "I'd like to see you in my office after lunch."

She was, however, going to need more coffee.

* * *

"What did she want to talk to you about?" Pauleen asked as she and Dina mucked about the school's cavernous library. "Was it about your hair?"

"Enough with my hair!" the ginger exclaimed in response. "Just because I make fun of it doesn't mean you get to." She paused to give the librarian an apologetic glance and exhale sharply through her nose. "Besides, it's starting to grow back."

Pauleen's delicate features twisted themselves into a smirk as she pointed out that it really wasn't. Dina and her decidedly less dainty face scowled. Then she pulled a hair tie off her wrist and instructed her friend to close her eyes as she shook out her hair and pulled it over head in a sloppy excuse for a side ponytail.

_Hmph, _she thought, triumphant._ Take that!_

"And even if it ain't growing back – which it is," Dina informed the Digadig girl, "now you can barely notice that fact that I have no hair on one side of my head."

"You look stupid" was Pauleen's only comment. Scowling even more, Dina whipped out her compact, scrutinised her reflection, and tugged a lock of hair out of the unfortunately floofy mess upon her head. Blowing the hair away as it came to rest in front of her face, Dina demanded, "Better?"

"Eh, sure."

The two moved along down the shelves, Dina knocking books over and Pauleen picking them up behind her. Their falls echoed in the large room, and the librarian, despite all her old-lady-niceness, visibly tensed in anger every time Dina sent one of them clattering down and skidding across the library's black granite floors. Dina felt almost glad that her footsteps, at least, were mouse-quiet.

They stopped at a small table flanked by two weathered grey armchairs in the reading area, under one of the large Plesiosaur skeletons hanging from the ice-coloured ceiling. It was covered in scores of ancient, yellowed maps, but the reading area was mostly empty. After all, most students had already decided upon locations for their excavations.

Dina and Pauleen sat themselves down and began thumbing through the maps.

The ex-punk couldn't speak for her friend, but she wasn't finding anything useful at all. Most of the maps weren't even accurate, forget interesting; the interesting ones all seemed to map deep-ocean trenches or the plains of faraway countries. Dina loved geography and exploring, just like any other girl, but she doubted they'd be allowed out of the region for this assignment. And if they were, Pauleen probably wouldn't want to leave anyway.

It didn't take long for either of them to set down their papers and stare at each other with arched eyebrows, faces the epitomes of boredom. Pauleen cracked a smile.

"Coffee break?" she asked.

"Are we even allowed out of here until we finish working?" Dina countered, sagging back into her seat.

Pauleen shrugged in a "True That" kind of way. Then her face brightened.

"So, what did old Flynn want to talk to you about?"

Dina shrugged, too, but hers was lazy and almost halfhearted. "Career choices," she said nonchalantly. "She wants me to go into palaeontology."

"You mean you don't?"

"Nah, you know me. I was never interested; my dad was the one to sign me up for the test in the first place. I've always liked fish better. Wanna do marine biology." She paused to stretch and yawn. "But she's being, well, Flynny about it." Another pause. Here she pulled a random map from her pile and shook out its creases, then narrowed her eyes at the spidery wrioting scrawled in the corner. "Hey," she began, "how would you kind doing me a favour?"

"Will it involve strenuous mental activity, large amounts of money, or members of the Wheatley Palaeontology School for Girls' faculty?"

"Er . . . no . . . ?"

"Then I'm in. What is it?"

Dina grinned, and pushed the map over the table. She pointed a slender finger to the middle of the vast expanse of blue watercolour covering the old paper with a flourish, then looked up at her long-time friend, smile still plastered on her face. "I'm going to prove old Headmistress wrong. This excavation, my friend, shall be my college degree." Dina lifted her finger off the paper and crossed her arms smugly. "We shall be digging in Bottomsup Bay."

"Ooh!" Pauleen leaned over the table, _her_ smile bigger and brighter than a street lamp of incredibly considerable size. "I'm _so_ in."

Dina's spirits soared. She hadn't expected it to be so easy. A million wordless thoughts of rainbows and butterflies and kittens danced through her head at a million miles per hour, and she could feel them bubbling up in her throat as a bout of triumphant singing and perhaps victorious disco-dancing – until her brain kicked in and reality chased all the kittens away.

"You're just agreeing so you can see Luke, right?"

Pauleen waved airily. "Maybe. But you should be happy I agreed at all."

Dina arched an eyebrow.

"OK, OK, I'm doing this just to see Luke."

Dina rolled her eyes. "I thought so."

* * *

**AN: Yeah, this is pretty bad I'm not going to lie. But the second chapter should be better, and if anybody is actually reading this they're in luck because I already posted it! Since nothing happens here but I needed it out of the way, I figured I'd write some actual plot too. Thank you for reading!**


	2. Bottoms Up

**AN: Hello to all of you who made it all the way here! I haven't gotten an less new to this in the three minutes it took me to remember how to make a new document, so I'll just say ****_Fossil Fighters is NOT mine _****and get on with some actual writing!**

* * *

Bottomsup Bay was discovered in 1723 by a man named (Colonel) Alfred Bottomsup, hence the bay's name. Story says that Alfred took one look at the choppy grey water, rocky cove beach, and sky-high cattails through his telescope one day and decided to call the place home. His troops helped him build a small collection of houses a few hundred yards from the water, and thus the bayside town of Bottomsup was born.

Now, nearly three hundred years later, Bottomsup had changed considerably. A great many new houses had sprung up during the years to accommodate the town's population of nearly one thousand, along with a handful of mom-n-pops, a few schools for children of various ages, and most importantly (in Dina's opinion, anyway), a bustling boardwalk.

That's where she and Pauleen were now: slowly meandering down the worn wooden planks separating Bottomsup from its bay with their pickaxes over their shoulders, a fine layer of sand on their shoes and cattails in their faces. Pauleen had a tub of curly fries and Dina a tent, two large backpacks, several large boxes, and a shovel (for "really, Dina, you _are_ a lot better at carrying things than I am! That's the only area where you've got me beat, isn't that great?"). Still, she felt rather content. After all, she had managed to drag Pauleen into one of her many Get-Dina-Into-College schemes, gotten to visit her hometown for the first time in ages, and was getting to go to the beach for school.

"Curly fry?" Pauleen asked after a while, waving one of said fried potatoes in her redheaded friend's face.

"You know me so well," Dina replied with a snort. Unfortunately, Pauleen wasn't nearly as well-versed in how to eat junk food without use of any of one's appendages – and Dina didn't even know where to start. So the two of them resumed their walk in silence.

The Digadig girl made another stab at conversation a few steps later. "Do you think Luke still works at the surf shop?"

"Dude, he practically owns it. Of course he does."

"Think he's still dating that Kerry chick?"

"You mean you don't follow his Tweeter?" Dina paused, leaning against the railing. She snickered into her hand. "They got _engaged_."

Pauleen burst into a peal of giggles. "No way!" she scoffed, her eyes bugging out. "Wow, really? There go all _my_ childhood hopes and dreams."

"Didn't they disappear when Luke and Kerry started dating in the first place? Or back when he started _middle school_? Or—"

"Alright, alright, no need to rub it in."

Silence fell again. Pauleen, mock-mopey over the disappearance of her childhood hopes and dreams, began to fall behind, so Dina trekked on without her. A few long strides brought her off the uneven planks of the boardwalk and on to the rough sand of the beach.

She took a few steps further out, away from the boardwalk, and set down her various oddities with a sigh. Running her hand through her hair (and immediately regretting it), Dina knelt down in the sand, tugged the tent out of its funny little bag, and set about trying to set it up.

Dina had been camping before. Many times, in fact. She'd thought she'd be ready for this part of the assignment: after all, she's been helping her parents hold the tent poles and light marshmallows on fire more times than she could count.

But she'd never been camping when it was this _windy_. First the bag was sent flying, and Dina had to sprint after it and tackle it into submission, only to find all the little screws and things that had been in the bag were rolling every which way over the sand, finding their way under the boardwalk, into holes, and even into the water. It took the "experienced camper" almost five minutes to find them all.

Then the tarp was off to who-knew-where, flapping noisily as it streaked across the beach. Dina broke into a sprint again as she chased after it, zigzagging back and forth with her arms outstretched until she finally managed to wrap her fingers around a corner of the fabric and bring it down from its short-lived freedom.

Luckily, the poles were easy enough. The tide was out, so the sand was damp and easy to work with. Dina just stuck the poles through their designated holes and stomped them into the ground – no great amount of effort was involved there, thankfully. The rain fly had been balled up in a backpack pocket, so putting that up was another easy job.

By the time she was done, Pauleen had made it almost completely off the boardwalk. Dina waved her over.

"Hey," she called, "the tent's up!"

"I can see that," Pauleen shouted back. "What now?"

"Um . . . " Dina stood up and dusted herself off, then spun around with her hands on her hips, surveying the horizon. The dull water of the bay stretched almost as far as she could see, but the brilliant gold and orange light of the sunset was shining through the cloud cover and giving the bay a little more oomph. "I don't kno—"

"Trick question, we're going digging!" trilled Pauleen, running up to the water's edge and flinging her sundress in the general direction of the tent, leaving her standing in just her bikini despite the cool October weather (and the undoubtedly frigid October water). Dina opened her mouth to protest, but thought better of it. Pauleen was impossible to argue with, and besides, she didn't seem to feel cold. Dina remembered the winter they'd first met, when all the other little kids at Bottomsup's little ice rink were huddled together like penguins in layer upon layer of winter clothing and Pauleen had twirled past in a frilly ballet costume and lacy tights, totally unscathed.

_So we are, _Dina thought, shrugging off her coat, kicking off her shoes, and picking up her shovel. Slowly she made her way down to where Pauleen stood, shivering with each footfall. The sand was colder than her rain boots let on, and even her full-body wetsuit wasn't impervious to the wind.

"What's the plan?"

Dina smirked. "You, the great and mighty _Pauleen_, are asking little old _me_ for a plan? You haven't already thought of one?"

Pauleen's face flushed. With her red face, pink hair, and multicoloured bikini, she made a stark contrast to the grey of their surroundings. "I didn't feel like planning today" was her lame excuse.

"Whatever," Dina laughed. "OK, so . . . let's start simple. We'll go find a few small things, like ammonites or trilobites, and use that for a 'study' of the kinds of animals that lived in the shallower areas of the bay. That shouldn't take long." She paused to look at Pauleen, only to find the Digadig girl staring at her like nothing stupider had ever happened to the world. She groaned. "Don't look at me like that, Pauleen. I know _we_ know all about the fossils here. But the teachers don't know we know, so we're doing this for easy A's. Capisce?"

"Fine," Pauleen huffed. She flounced into the deeper water, her body language screaming "Better Than You." Dina rolled her eyes – Pauleen wasn't the easiest best friend in the world – and waded out after the pink-haired Fighter.

Bottomsup Bay was known for being rich in all kinds of life, and Dina was finding tiny shells of tiny dead animals in almost every scoop of mud she brought up from the bay-floor. After a good forty-five minutes of digging, it became a sort of game between the two teenaged girls: they'd plunge their shovels into the mud at the same time, and then race to see who'd find something and bring it to shore first.

Even with the rush of their game, Dina soon fell into a steady rhythm. She became so wrapped up in her work she didn't notice Pauleen shout her name in alarm – and was promptly crashed into by a motorised rubber raft. She flew backwards onto the sand.

"H-hey!" she spluttered, coughing (the boat had hit her square in the stomach, knocking the wind out of her). "What was that all about?"

"Excuse me?" demanded a tremulous male voice. "What do you mean? _You_ were the one who got in _our_ way!"

Dina looked up to see the speaker, a slight, mousy-haired boy in a green coat and pants, stomp her way and glare at her with watery blue eyes.

"I don't know who you think you are," he continued hotly, "but I'll have you know—"

"That's enough," another male voice cut him off. Its owner stepped off the raft and strode up to stand beside his partner. This boy was taller, with paper-white hair and catlike yellow eyes. His glare was catlike, too, and with his tailored red jacket and shiny boots, his appearance was the very image of snootiness.

Dina hated boys like him. They got their driver's licenses illegally early and drove to school in sports cars they got with Daddy's money, and bribed the teachers to get better grades than they deserved. They were vain, rude and pompous, and always more than a little narcissistic. Boys like him would use their last drops of water to slick back their to look good as they died of dehydration in the Parchment Desert.

"I'm not going to yell at you," he drawled. "Nor will I resort to violence, or make a scene in any such brutish way . . . like Todd here." He shot his partner a withering glare, which the smaller boy didn't seem to notice. "But I am going to have to tell you to leave. We have work to do here."

"So do we," said Dina coolly, pushing herself to her feet and sizing the two boys up. They both seemed to be around her age, but she didn't think that would pose a problem if it did come to violence (or any other such "brutish" thing). She was certainly bigger than the one called Todd, who stood at 5'2" and couldn't have weighed over ninety pounds, and while the snooty one was tall and broad-shouldered, with the lean kind of build that came from hoity-toity gym memberships, Dina was fast and she hit hard.

"We're with the Wheatley School," said the snooty boy.

Dina grinned. "So are we." Before either boy could say anything to that, she gestured to the tent and her pile of fossils, crossed her arms, and narrowed her eyes. "And we got here first."

"You keep saying 'we,'" sneered Todd, "but who are you here with? Your imaginary friends?"

She felt her cheeks grow hot at that comment, but pressed her lips together and pointed to the bay, where Pauleen seemed to be trying to make herself as small as possible. "Tall, tan, and busty over there," she said. "Unfortunately, she suffers from a rare allergy to jerks like you, so—"

The damage was done before Dina could even finish her sentence. Both boys turned their heads in the direction Dina was pointing, and while Rupert didn't seem like it was possible for him to care less, Todd was jogging down to the surf in an almost trancelike fashion, stammering out "hello"s and "how-do-you-do"s to a confused-looking Pauleen. Dina sighed. When even Pauleen, who became the shyest person in the world when presented with strangers – especially those of the opposite gender – thought a boy was being stupid, the boy in question was seriously stupid.

"She doesn't seem to be allergic," mused the snooty boy dryly. Dina scowled.

"Oh, shut up."

Dina angrily went to unpack her things as Todd and Pauleen made awkward conversation and the snooty boy snooted about. She deftly made her way through her backpack, placing clothes in neat piles and slamming notebooks on top of each other with tight, precise movements. She was just about to begin unpacking Pauleen's bag for her when Pauleen herself poked her head into the tent, her cheeks flushed and her smile devious.

"Guess what?" she asked.

"You drowned that Todd kid?" Dina replied, leaning against the far wall of the tent. Pauleen shook her head.

"Actually, 'the Todd kid' and I came up with a genius idea." She paused for effect. "Since we're all here on our excavations together, we thought . . . "

"Thought what, Pauleen?"

". . . that . . ."

"_That what?_"

". . . we'd all do the project together!"

She paused again to let it sink in. Once it did, Dina's jaw dropped and her hearing went tinny – because no way was she working together with those kids. No way was she working together with the snooty boy!

She professed her grievances to her friend, explaining her loathing for the snooty boy and her irritation with Todd. She went to great lengths to try and convince the Digadig that the amounts of testosterone they'd be exposed to would interfere with their work and even almost burst into song (Pauleen often did this herself, and Dina found that the antic was beginning to rub off on her). But Pauleen Digadig was having none of it. It would be faster with four people, she said, and Dina owed her for agreeing to do the project here. And in the end, Dina had to agree to a collaboration with the students from the Wheatley Palaeontology School for Boys, however reluctantly.

* * *

Night fell quickly after that, as it so often does during the later part of the year. Todd and the snooty boy, who'd introduced himself as Rupert Wheatley ("Yes, my father does own both of the Wheatley Schools, and yes, he is one of the richest, most influential men in the region . . . it's OK if you're awestruck") had set up their tent right next to the girls', and they built a tiny fire between the two tents, where they all sat and roasted marshmallows.

It was intended to be a social activity, the marshmallow roasting, but Dina was making pointed conversation with Pauleen and Pauleen only, and neither one of the boys was talking to anyone at all. Had there not been any marshmallows involved, Dina would be tempted to call the activity a flop (and to proceed and yell "I told you so" at Pauleen and Todd very, very loudly), but the sugar managed to keep her temper in check, if only for the night.

However, marshmallows or no marshmallows, boys or no boys, Dina couldn't help but wonder what she was doing. Sure, she'd gotten out to Bottomsup Bay, and sure, she'd found lots of little fossils to write back to school about, but Wheatley School expeditions weren't something most colleges looked for in marine biology majors. With her lack of experience in the scientific community, Dina knew that she was going to have to make one heck of a discovery if anyone was going to take her seriously.

Eventually, Dina supposed she'd take that when she got there. She had Fossil Fighting to think about, after all. Whether she liked it or not, it was going to be a far more pressing issue in her life for the next four years.

And for the next two months . . . well, then even Fossil Fighting paled in comparison to the issue of _boys_ – namely _Rupert_, of course. But, looking up at the hundreds of thousands of stars that freckled the night sky, Dina thought that even they could wait.

Then one of them – namely _Todd_, of course – dropped his marshmallow into the fire and the flames leaped, filling the air with the smell of burnt marshmallow and nearly burning Rupert's face off, and Dina thought, _maybe not._

* * *

**AN: Well that's that! I don't have much to say except that I'm sorry about Pauleen maybe being out of character – I wanted to mix her ego, her shyness, and eventual niceness into one and don't know how well that worked. Oh well, I'm sure I'll get the hang of it in later chapters! Thanks for reading! Katie out.**


	3. Way Out West

**AN: Yay hurray happy day, woo! Er, that is to say, neither Fossil Fighters nor cuddleofdeath's catchphrase belong to me.**

* * *

Dina awoke to the sound of yells and shouts early that morning. Half of it, she knew, was from Kent and his surfer gang, who'd be out on their boards every day until Christmas. She chose to blame the other half on Rupert. The more trouble he caused, the more likely he'd be kicked out of the operation, after all.

Shrugging a sweatshirt on over her nightgown, Dina crawled out of her tent, yawning. She put her hand over her eyes to shield them from the sun's harsh glare as she walked down the beach. In the Bottomsup area, the autumn sun had been known to be bright enough to blind people (without any particular scientific reason). Having grown up there, Dina had learned to take precautions.

When she reached the water's edge, she looked around anxiously. Part of her was really hoping that Rupert was causing trouble (last night's unsaid "I told you so"s were creeping back into her mind) but at the same time, she didn't want drama. She felt it was an entirely superfluous part of life.

"Dina!" came a cry from somewhere off to her left. "Aw, man, now today's _totally_ gnarlitude!"

She whirled around and grinned. Running up to meet her was Kent in all his strange surfer glory: nose permanently sunburnt and seaweed in his hair. Behind him was a gaggle of other teenaged boys with surfboards, also running towards her. _Just like old times,_ she thought. She laughed. Bottomsup's resident surfing idiots really hadn't changed since they were all eight.

"Hey guys," she said. "What's up?"

"Man, it's so cool!" laughed Terry, Kent's right hand man, procuring a scrap of yellow plastic from his pocket. Upon closer inspection, Dina saw it was a corner of a chip bag, presumably ripped off when Terry hadn't figured out how to open the bag properly. "OK, so get this, there's this guy – fancy suit, fancy hair, you know the type – and he tells us to get off the beach 'cuz he has a job or something like. And we're like, 'no way man', but he says we get a bag of chips if we agree!"

"So we do," continued the gang's newest addition, a gangly brunette Dina knew as Holt, "but we didn't say when we'd leave! Haha!"

"Haha," Dina laughed along, but then the pieces fell into place in her mind. "Wait . . . a suit? A job?" An image of Rupert began forming in her mind. "Oh my gosh, guys, no. I know him. You've got to do what he tells you or I'm going to be hearing about it . . . and somebody's getting sued."

"Whoa nelly," Kent said nervously. "This isn't like you at all, Dina. You're being totally wack! You know, there's only one explanation for this." He leaned in closer to her. "This guy . . . must be your boyfriend!"

"No!" shrieked Dina. Luckily, Terry seemed to be on her side.

"Now you're wack, dude," said the black-haired boy. "He was way too prissy for her. Besides . . . "

_Besides what? _Dina wanted to ask, but didn't.

" . . . Dina's got Bean!"

Terry was officially no longer on her side.

Dina giggled faintly and ran her hand through her hair in an attempt to _not_ look like the very mention of her ex-boyfriend's name made her want to murder someone. "Oh, actually, we broke up the other day," she said.

"Called it!" exclaimed her cousin Dino, who prided himself on being the strangest member of the gang. "I knew it would happen! Surfers over skaters, that's what I always say – after all, it's the fundamental law of physics!"

"Actually, the only _really_ absolute law in physics is that nothing can go faster than the speed of light," Dina attempted to explain, but the surfers were having none of it.

"That's chemistry, dummy," said Dino, and flicked her on the head. The other surfers nodded their assent.

"Whatever," sighed Dina. Science class could happen another day. "Look, just don't mess with the guy in the suit, OK? You guys could . . . go to the coffee shop instead! I bet Stella would be happy to—"

"STELLA!" they all shouted in unison, dropping their boards in their haste to run across the boardwalk. They had always been infatuated with Stella, who was one of the only girls in Bottomsup who could put up with their strange antics. Not only that, but she seemed to enjoy their company and was pretty, too, with warm brown eyes and a permanent smile. This made her far more popular than the other two tolerant girls in town (Dina, who they all saw as a little sister anyway, and Nevada Montecarlo, who was nearly seven feet tall and sold moonshine – all in all, a force to be reckoned with).

Dina watched them go and shook her head. Tolerant as she was, that didn't make her immune, and even just a conversation with the surfers always made her a little tired, a little dizzy.

"Good," came a voice from behind her, "they're gone."

"Hey," Dina replied, an angry tone creeping into her voice as she turned around to see Rupert, "that wasn't cool. You don't own the beach, Pretty Boy."

"Pretty Boy, huh?" muttered the said junior Fossil Fighter under his breath. "I might as well," he told Dina in a louder voice. "I mean, I could probably buy this entire town with a week's allowance." He said nothing else on the topic, but his gist was clear. _Bottomsup is poor man's land,_ Dina could read between the lines, _and it's not like anybody would miss it, anyhow._

"You take that back!" yelled the ginger indignantly, but the cat-eyed boy payed the comment no heed.

"Anyway," he drawled on, "Pauleen wanted me to come get you. Group meeting just finished—"

"You had a meeting _without_ me!?" Dina demanded, but again she was ignored.

"—and we have come to a conclusion," Rupert said ominously. "We're going to need a submarine."

* * *

"Why couldn't we take Todd with us?" Pauleen asked for the umpteenth time as she and Dina strolled through the streets of their small bayside hometown.

"Gosh, Pauleen, you're so obsessed with him," Dina joked. "But anyway, he would just slow us down. And that is that, for the very last time."

"Hmph," she said, but she followed Dina's orders.

Dina pulled her hood down on her head and stuffed her hands in her pockets. The two teenaged girls hadn't had a plan when they'd hit the beach, but Rupert and Todd had heard rumours about a sunken ship at the bottom of the bay. They thought it might have been the infamous pirate Captain Woolbeard's – meaning it was bound to be loaded with rare fossils. However, they hadn't taken the fact that the ship was on the bottom of the bay into consideration and were just as landlocked as the girls thought they were.

That was where a one Mr Joe Wildwest came into play. Joe had graduated the Wheatley Palaeontology School for Boys a year earlier than his peers when his teachers had deemed him too gifted to stay in the institution. He went on to become the greatest Fossil Fighter in the world after that, winning every tournament he entered . . . and entering every tournament there was.

However, his glory was short-lived. Nobody knew what happened, but during the third year of his reign as the best of the best, Joe just . . . crashed. He stopped winning battles, then he stopped entering battles at all. He moved out to Bottomsup, which as as far out in the sticks as his manager would let him go, built a three-storey mansion for himself and his Vivosaurs, bought everything he could, and spent his days telling anybody who would listen that he had been possessed by the skull of an ancient sorcerer named Zongazonga.

But Dina could care less about Zongazonga. Even at school, she and Pauleen were avid tabloid followers, and they both remembered how funny they'd found it when the reportedly hydrophobic Fighter had purchased a mini-sub for several hundred thousand G and promptly locked it up in his garage.

And so the two of them were making their way to his aforementioned mansion, their most charismatic, convincing smiles plastered to their faces as they wobbled across their cobblestones in their sky-high heels and stiff tweed suits (they'd wanted to look official, but even Pauleen's wardrobe had its limits). It had to be said it was a challenging walk, but it also had to be done. So it was.

After a good twenty minutes, they reached the winding gravel path that led up to the Wildwest manor. Dina's smile slid off her face and she exhaled sharply, kicking off her shoes and wiggling her toes around before sliding the stilettos back on and nodding to her friend. "Shall we?"

"Yeah, let's," said Pauleen, straightening her blouse. The two of them walked with purposeful strides to the staircase and stopped at the double oak doors, where Dina curled her hand into a fist and held it poised over the door on the right.

_No doorbell, and no knocker, either,_ Dina mused, a slight frown flitting across her face. _What happened to him? He used to seem so social!_

"Dina. Knock. Now," Pauleen instructed her. Dina swallowed her thoughts and brought her hand down on the door, pulled it away, and repeated. Three times she knocked, before the doors swung open and a tall man with wild hair and wild eyes appeared. He wore a leather duster over a sticky-looking bathrobe, and his face was flushed with anger.

"I DON'T WANT ANY COOKIES!" he roared. Dina narrowed her eyes.

"We're not with the Girl Scouts, sir," she said, smile long gone.

"Not anymore, anyway!" Pauleen piped up. Dina nudged her. _Shut it,_ the gesture said.

"We're here to talk business," Dina went on, wiping her clammy hands on her skirt. "Would you like to talk out here on your porch, in the cold, or may we come in?"

". . . Gimme a second," said Joe Wildwest gruffly. Before Pauleen or Dina could say anything, he stepped backwards and slammed the doors in their faces.

"What now?" Pauleen asked.

Dina crossed her arms. "Now we wait."

* * *

"So," grumbled a clean-shaven, fully-dressed Joe Wildest ten minutes later, "lemme get this straight. _Yer_ wanna borrow _mah_ sub for school?"

"Yes, sir," said Pauleen nervously.

"Well, no," said Joe plaintively. "It's mine."

"We aren't asking for it permanently," Dina tried to explain. "Just for a few weeks."

"Have I ever told y'all about _Zongehrzongehr_?" Joe said by way of response. He had, back when the two girls _were_ actually Girl Scouts and were selling cookies to this very mansion, but he left them no room for argument.

He launched into a tale even more detailed than the one Dina heard when she was nine, filled with treachery and tragedy, romance and randomness. There was a temple in the jungle and some kind of conspiracy . . . Dina wasn't listening. She had problems more pressing than a mad cowboy's tall tales, even when the cowboy was a vital part in her success, and it was a story she knew all too well, anyhow. Joe was a foolhardy explorer whose curiosity had gotten the better of him one day, causing him to open an incredibly suspicious-looking coffin of some kind; Zongazonga's skull leapt out and forced Joe's out of his head, then started some kind of competition to find the most suitable host body.

" . . . So, that'll be twenty thousand G," Joe finished abruptly. Dina's head snapped up.

"Huh?" She looked at Pauleen, who seemed just as perplexed as her friend, then back at Joe. "_Huh_?"

"Fer the boat," grumbled the cowboy. "Yah've got a week to pay." He stood up and pushed open the door angrily. "Now get outta mah house."

* * *

Dina finished recounting her tale with a sigh. That evening they had called another group meeting (including everybody's favourite ginger this time around, something a one Rupert Wheatley was not tickled pink about), and Dina had decided to be blunt and tell them exactly how unsuccessful the meeting with Joe was.

"Well . . . " said Todd, who Dina had come to know as annoyingly optimistic. "Does anybody here have twenty thousand G? Rupert, you're rich, couldn't you get us the money?"

"_No_," "Pretty Boy" sullenly spat. "I'm . . . well, _grounded_. Father said I didn't get to borrow any money after . . . well, stuff that isn't any of your busniness happened."

"Ha, ha," jeered Dina, but a cold look from Pauleen shut her up before she could execute any insults.

"Actually," Pauleen said coolly, "I've got some good news." She reached into her bag and pulled out a flyer. "This," she announced, "is a flyer."

"We can see that," said Rupert hesitantly.

"And inside this flyer—" (here the pinkette glared at Rupert for his comment)— "is information on our one-way ticket to fifty thousand G and also Joe Wildwest's submarine." She paused for effect, which Todd didn't seem to understand.

"Well?" he prompted after a millisecond. "What is it?"

"It's a Fossil Fighting tournament," Pauleen said with a grin. "It's called the Caliosteo Cup."

* * *

**AN: Hey, I updated! It could have been better, I know, but I wanted to update as soon as I could. Thanks so much to those who reviewed, and thanks so much to those of you who just read! Thanks to all of you! Katie out.**


	4. Uncommon Criminals

**AN: Chapter four! This is going a lot better than I thought it would. That's a good thing, I think. Anyways I don't own Fossil Fighters.**

* * *

"Eenie meenie minie moe," Pauleen said, her finger skipping across her companions' heads. "Catch a Smilo by the toe."

Dina watched her friend's hand go round and round. She scowled. With the entrance fee to the Caliosteo Cup being expensive even by Rupert Wheatley's standards, the four intrepid teenagers had decided to pool their strongest Dino Medals and randomly decide who the person to compete would be.

But that meant there was a twenty-five per cent chance – _No, _she reminded herself, _thirty three per cent now that Todd's out _– that she would be competing. Only thirty three. That wasn't much to go on, and even though Dina didn't particularly enjoy Fossil Fighting, she _had_ to be better than Rupert. _Had to_. And this was the only way she felt she could show that.

Still, she managed a smile as she found the voice to chant along to the game. "If it hollers, let it go," she chorused, albeit dryly. "Eenie, meenie, minie, moe."

"The colours of the flag are red, white and blue," Pauleen said. "And that—" her finger landed on herself— "means—" on Rupert— "not—" Dina— "you!" She was pointing at herself again. Her face fell. "Oh well," she sighed, "I'm out. Darn it, digadig!"

"It's OK," Dina consoled her. "I'll make sure to win for you!"

Rupert glared at her. "Don't get too ahead of yourself, Batterbits. This game isn't over yet."

_This game . . . ?_ It took Dina a moment it realise he meant their little session of Eenie Meenie Minie Moe. Then she shook her head. _That's stupid, and so is calling someone "Batterbits". Nobody ever even buys the orange ones!_

"Eenie meenie minie moe," Pauleen began again, her dejection forgotten. "Catch a Smilo by the toe. If it hollas, let it go, eenie, meenie, minie, moe! The colours of the flag are red, white and blue."

Dina sucked in her breath.

"And that means . . ."

Rupert's eyes narrowed and Dina felt her own do the same.

". . . not . . ."

Dina crossed her fingers behind her back.

". . . you!" Pauleen jabbed her finger at Rupert. "You're out, Wheatley!"

Dina pumped her fist in the air and Rupert's face twisted into a scowl. _Typical, r_ead the look on his face. _I'm going to murder someone for this._

Still, he managed an impassive expression as he pressed his Mapo Dino Medal into Dina's hand (and promptly jerked his own away as if he'd been burned). Then he quickly resumed his place behind Todd, away from the horridly common Dina Madison Clarke and her not-as-rich-as-she-could-be best friend. Dina rolled her eyes. The male percentage of the world was hopeless.

"Will you be entering in the Cup, young lady?" asked a nasal voice from to her left. The speaker, a pimply teenaged boy in an ill-fitting Fossil Centre staff uniform, narrowed his eyes at the ginger, who recoiled slightly as she nodded.

"Eyes on the prize, Dina," hissed Pauleen. Dina recomposed herself. Even if men were hopeless, and even if Rupert was Rupert, she had business to attend to.

* * *

And so Dina attended to her business; for four straight days, day and night, she battled. And battled. And battled. Took the odd water break, and battled some more. It was incredibly tiring.

The team she and her companions had put together wasn't the most conventional, nor was it particularly prone to following the orange-haired fish lover's orders. This fact did not pass unnoticed by the media. All the reporters at the Cup seemed to talk about was the Amargo who disregarded the rules to attack the opponent Fighter in hope of an easier victory, or the Stego with the tendency to attack solely out of turn.

But despite the fault in Dina's stars (and her team), she made it successfully to the final round. It took place on the Thursday of that week, in chilly, secluded Illium Village, way up in the northernmost part of Caliosteo. Dina and her gang were left with no way to get up there other than a very suspicious tour bus, which was being driven by a boy no older than them who had decided purple was a good colour to be wearing with his yellow-orange hair and almost attempted relieving Pauleen of both her wallet and her Dino Medals, but had received a stiletto-heeled kick to the face for his efforts. Still, they managed to reach the arena without too much trouble after that.

"Er, bye then," said Dina to Pauleen, Rupert, and Todd, standing awkwardly with her hands in her pockets. She had on her good winter coat for the occasion, along with tall black boots and a drab grey dress. Among the population of the village, and even her fellow adventurers, in their practical neon-coloured snow gear, she felt like a mourner at a hip-hop convention of sorts. Or perhaps a wedding.

"You'd better not lose," Todd instructed her. "We're pretty much doomed if we don't get the prize money." He'd become less hostile towards her over the past few days, but he was a devout Rupert fan through and through, and what – or who – Rupert didn't like, the little brown-haired boy scorned with a passion.

"But no pressure or anything," Pauleen scrambled to add. Rupert remained silent.

"Haha," said Dina weakly. She wasn't one to worry about losing, not usually, but Todd was right: a lot depended on her winning the prize money and getting them their submarine. "Well, wish me luck."

None of them did.

Dina kept her back straight and her chin up as she walked into the Fighter Station, the sound of her heels clicking across the marble floor echoing in the empty lobby. At first she wondered where everyone was – with it being the finals, the lobby should have been packed, and there was usually a staff member of some kind to lead her to where she needed to be or who she needed to meet, besides – but with a start she realised she must have been late. She hurried to the common room.

It too, was empty, deserted except for a slim figure in mauve on one of the benches. This must have been her opponent.

Dina approached the figure, who looked to be a girl around Dina's age, with carnation-coloured hair in two neat ponytails and a crisply ironed explorer's uniform, complete with a pink pith helmet. The ginger did her best not to show her distaste, but mauve was not a colour that looked particularly good on anybody, especially not when paired with pink.

"Hello," said the girl. "My name is Rosie."

Dina reached out to shake the hand Rosie didn't offer. "Dina," she replied. "Congratulations on making it this far in the tournament."

"Save your congratulations for when I win," Rosie sniffed. Dina narrowed her eyes, but said nothing.

"What happened to your face, by the way?" the pink-haired Fighter asked. Dina turned to one of the reflective chrome walls and scrutinised her reflections, cold eyes skipping over the thin lips and sunken cheeks she'd always hated until they reached her left eyebrow, which was marred by an ugly mass of scar tissue. Dina grimaced. Bean, her ex, had really been a bad influence, and after convincing her to shave half her head, he'd somehow gotten her to get several piercings. A few weeks ago, she'd realised just how ugly the one in her eyebrow was, and had tried ripping it out – to entirely too much avail. She'd needed seven stitches.

"Ninjas," Dina said offhandedly. Rosie didn't believe it at all, and the two walked down the hall in silence.

However, the topic of the scar she'd probably be stuck with until senior citizenship had made Dina feel incredibly self-conscious, and she kept stealing glances at her reflection, mentally cursing her choice of dress (she looked like a teacher), her hair (Rosie's hairstyle really was more practical), and a million other things on top of that (_These shoes make me look prissy, _she thought, _and next to Rosie and her healthy complexion I look positively cadaverous_). She mollified her mind by reminding it that Rosie had decided to wear mauve on a day other than Halloween.

The doors opened with a soft hiss, and whitish fog from the arena's smoke machines began seeping into the room. Dina nodded at Rosie and Rosie glared Dina, and the two stepped out onto the field.

Dina wasn't really thinking as she slid her hand into her pocket and pulled out three Dino Medals, despite the seriousness of the competition. She didn't have a strategy, either, and she hadn't eaten breakfast. Her mind had been almost completely blank all day.

But, she found, the Dino Medal part wasn't much to worry about. Even though it was technically cheating, Dina had always had a bad habit of stealing a glance at her opponent's Medals before battling, and this time, her opponent's Medals were all rimmed with red. _Fire types,_ she thought. She looked at the Krona, Mapo, and Amargo Medals she had in her hand. _Should be easy._

Some famous model-y person, a blue-eyed blond whom the announcers called Duna, received the honour of firing a rhinestoned pistol in the air and starting the match. Rosie and Dina let out their Vivosaurs at the same time, Rosie still managing to be dramatically prissy despite the heat of battle and the cold of the arena and Dina wishing there weren't quite so many cameras trained on her face.

The battle, though not as one-sided as Dina had originally thought, wasn't as hard as she had feared, either. Both girls lost a Vivosaur on their opponent's first attacks (Dina lost Pauleen's Amargo and Rosie her Maia), and after that they ended up chip, chip, chipping away at the opposing team's LP, using low-FP attacks and hoping for critical hits (of which there were almost none).

The audience was growing bored. Dina could feel it. The anticipation in the air had turned into restlessness and the excited quiet that had originally blanketed the crowd was often broken by idle chitchat. The Fighter Station staff brought out folding chairs and water bottles for Dina and Rosie once they'd passed the half-hour mark, and after an hour, a few people were calling out for them to cancel the match.

That's when the stadium lights went out.

The audience members who hadn't been talking began doing so, and those who had spoke louder. Uneasy mumbling and cries of "Who turned out the lights?" (often followed by a nervous snicker and hundreds of annoyed sighs) filled the air. One staff member had sprinted past Dina and down the hall, loudly fiddled with something for a few moments, then shouted, "We can't even get the emergency lights on – the fuse box is gone!"

"Gone?" asked Duna the possible model incredulously. "What do you mean, gone?"

"Gone, as in, ripped out of the wall," called the staff member. "Who—"

"Who did it doesn't matter," said Duna. "What they'll do next is the important part."

Dina silently agreed. Nobody just turned off lights for no reason. They might have been Eco-activists, trying to save power, or they might have wanted to cause a spot of mild disruption, but Dina knew there were only two good reasons this could have been done: Someone wanted a distraction, or—

"Get off me!" came a sharp cry from Rosie's side of the field. "Get off me, or I'll— mmph!"

_—Or someone's the world's most obvious thief._

Dina dropped her water bottle and darted over to Rosie, swinging her fists blindly in hoping to hit whoever had jumped the pink-haired girl, but a dancing beam of light from Rosie's phone revealed her attacker had vanished.

_"My Medals,"_ she mouthed, obviously not wanting to scare the audience any more but in dire need to get her word across. _"They're gone."_

Dina nodded in understanding and ran.

Instinct took her down the hall and up several flights of stairs, around several corners and into a series of empty rooms. Finally she caught a glimpse of a purple-clad figure bolting down a corridor and without a shred of doubt in her mind, Dina followed.

When she and the figure came out into the daylight, Dina instantly recognised him as the shady bus driver. She swore under her breath as he ran down the street and she speed-walked after him, not trusting her heels to safely take her anywhere on the ice if she was in too much of a hurry. She shivered, then swore again; while Pauleen may have been completely immune to the cold, Dina was not.

Eventually the ambiguous bus driver burst into a run-down looking warehouse on the outskirts of town. Dina was shivering and paper-white, her teeth chattering and appendages blue, but she caught the door with a numb hand before it slammed shut and slipped inside.

It was dark inside the warehouse. Very dark. So dark, Dina would later say, it made the arena feel like Bottomsup in the autumn – which is to say, blindingly bright. A strip of sunlight had fallen on the dusty floor when the door had creaked open, but it did nothing to illuminate the cavernous space and ultimately disappeared just as quickly as it appeared.

"I did it," panted the voice of the bus driver. "I got the goods."

"Did you, now?" asked another male voice, one Dina sincerely hoped didn't belong to who she thought it belonged to. "Bring them here."

The bus driver did as he was told and Dina could hear the smile in the second voice as it said, "Good job, Joe. Not bad for someone who's been out of the business for eleven years."

"Well," said the bus driver, Joe, with a nervous laugh, "you know what they say – you can't never change a Hadley."

Dina's stomach sank. She knew that name all too well, and not just from gang war and bank robbery stories in the paper.

"That's not usually meant in a good way, Joseph," came a sickly sweet female voice from somewhere above. Dina followed it with her stare until her gaze fell upon scores of silver eyes, shining in the darkness, glittering with malice as their owners stared at Joe and whoever he was talking to.

"Scout's right, it's not," drawled the male voice. "But today can be an exception. After all, it's a very special day."

And Dina, despite herself, couldn't help but wonder out loud, "It is?"

The sixty-something silver eyes that were locked on Joe and the mysterious speaker swivelled around to stare at Dina a the threshold, whose own eyes were wide with apprehension. Everything was quiet for a long, tense moment before the voice belonging to the mysterious male speaker began drawing closer to her.

"Well, well, well," he was saying, footsteps barely audible and eyes narrowed. "_Dina_. It's been a while, hasn't it?"

"Bernard Hadley," she said coolly, regaining her composure. "I'm sorry . . . _Bean_." She flashed a smile she doubted he could see and took a few long strides towards him, her heels going _click-clack, click-clack_ in a delightfully ominous way as she glided across the room. "It's been _ages_."

"All of six days," Bean said, his voice quiet and silky and despicable. "How have things been, Dina, darling?"

Dina bristled. _Don't call me that,_ she wanted to say, but bit it back. Instead she offered another smile and simpered, "Perfectly delightful, Beanie baby. How are things on your end? Are you still trying to con your way into the wills of innocent old ladies, or have you moved on to more respectable crimes?"

Bean's footsteps stopped briefly and Dina could tell he was swallowing back a million insults and trying hard to keep calm and not hit anyone. "I'm afraid I'm still in the business of petty larceny, dearest." He paused. "Although yesterday Scout invited me along for this grand scheme."

"And what, pray tell, are you doing here?" Dina asked. They'd both come to a stop, and they stood in the middle of the room, their gazes locked on each other's eyes and their foreheads almost touching.

"Oh, now, I'm not going to tell you _that_, Dina." Bean laughed. "Don't be stupid."

"You're the stupid one, _Bernard_," she spat, and when Joe, confused and seemingly afraid, ambled over to switch on the lights, she tackled Bean onto the floor and punched him hard across the jaw. A ripple of unease spread across the thirty or so other Hadley teenagers (cousins, Dina suspected, though you never knew with crime families) and a few of them, among the older and buffer in the group, began trickling down the stairs leading from their balcony to the warehouse floor. Dina fumbled around in her pocket for anything she could use as a weapon, and her fingers closed around the one Dino Medal she didn't end up using: Todd's Stego. Closing her eyes in a quick prayer the green Vivosaur would behave itself this time around, she threw it hard onto the floor, where the large herbivore quickly sprang into existence.

She raised her fists in front of her face, the Stego lifted its tail in a fighting stance of sorts, and all at once the little Hadley criminals attacked.

It had to be said that Todd's Stego was doing most of the work. Dina reassured herself it was perfectly logical. The Stego was far larger, after all, and stronger, and faster, and a Vivosaur. But Dina also thought she and the Stego made quite a fine team now that neither of them had to follow the rules. She punched whoever came near her, and it used its heavily spiked tail to clobber anyone who didn't.

Eventually Dina broke off from the little circle of defence she and the Vivosaur made in the centre of the room, scanning the room for the stolen Dino Medals and whatever other "goods" Joe had stolen from. It was hard to see anything clearly in the dim, flickering light, but Dina didn't think it would pose too much of a problem. Aside from the many teenagers complaining about headaches and the angry green Vivosaur giving them headaches, the room was empty, and Dina doubted the Medals could have gotten far in the short amount of time they'd spent in Hadley hands.

"Not so fast, Dina," said a voice from behind her. Dina idly turned around to see Bean staggering towards her, a trickle of blood dripping down from his jaw, which was black and blue and swollen. She must have hit him harder than she'd thought.

"Whatever do you mean, Bean?" Dina asked, but she knew exactly what he meant. If people were trying to stop her, she was going in the right direction.

"Just stop trying to play the hero. Let us keep the Medals, and we won't bother you any more. Or better yet . . ." Bean offered her a wan smile, which made his bruised face look like it was going to split in two. "Why not join us? A girl with your resources would be _incredibly_ useful to us . . ."

Dina didn't know what she was going to say to that, but thankfully, she didn't have to.

"DINA!" came a yell from the doors as they were flung open and the sound of thunderous footsteps filled the air. Startled, Dina tore her eyes away from the spot where Bean had been standing to gawk at the doorway, where a throng of police officers, batons in hand, stood blocking out the weak sunlight trying to work its way into the room, and in front of them stood . . .

"Pauleen! Todd! Rupert!" she shouted, forgetting her animosity towards the second two as she rushed to greet them. "Oh my gosh, what— why— how—"

"After a while, they handed out flashlights back at the stadium," Rupert explained, his voice oddly animated. "And after we could see again we saw you had disappeared."

"That Rosie girl told us you'd gone after the guy who'd wrecked everything," Todd went on. "So we decided to go after you."

"There were a few people ought on the street who'd seen you go this way," Pauleen said, "and I thought it looked pretty shady, so we called in the cops for some help."

Dina looked around at the police officers, who had fanned out and were handcuffing the little cutpurses left and right. Bean was nowhere to be seen; neither was the girl he called Scout, the leader of their little scheme, or Joe the Medal thief, but that was of little concern to her. She felt tolerably certain they'd be found soon enough.

"Dina?" She turned to see Rosie emerge from the crowd, her face contorted into a strange expression, a mixture of relief, confusion, and jealousy.

"Hey, Rosie," she said, oddly nonchalant. "Your Medals should be in here somewhere . . . should we continue the battle?"

"Oh, there's no need," said the mauve-clad girl with a flap of her hand. "Actually, since you did all this . . . I decided to forfeit."

"You _what_?" Dina repeated incredulously, her jaw dropping and her eyes bugging out. "But . . . but that means . . ."

"That's right," said Rosie, taking an envelope from Rupert's outstretched hand and presenting it to Dina. She opened it with a flourish, and pulled out a fancy-looking cheque. Dina's heart skipped a beat. "Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Dina something-or-other, winner of the Caliosteo Cup!"

* * *

**AN: Yay, I finished! This took a very long time, and it's also unfortunately long, I apologise for that. Also, the ending was sort of rushed. Sorry about that, too.**

**Nevertheless, thank you for reading, and special thanks to Cottonmouth25, whose comment made me especially happy! Katie out!**


	5. Under the Sea

**AN: Oh, nobody noticed Medal Dealer Joe? Oh well, no matter. Thank you for reviewing, and I don't own Fossil Fighters! **

* * *

"Did you know they were with the BB Bandits?"

"Really?"

"Mm."

"Wow."

Dina crossed one long pyjama-clad leg over the other, idly twirling a strand of hair around her finger as her gaze slid from her feet to Rupert's face behind his newspaper. As usual, he looked impossibly bored. Not for the first time, Dina wondered what he would look like when he wasn't so done with life or about to bite somebody's head off.

"Who are the BB Bandits?" she asked after a moment, furrowing her eyebrows.

"I have no idea."

There was another pause. Dina swung herself up from her sprawled-out pose on her sleeping bag and heaved a large sigh (her third in the past two minutes). She cocked her head to one side and skimmed the two pages of Rupert's newspaper she could see, then got to her feet and snatched it from his hands, staring at the grainy mug shots of the Medal-stealing Hadleys.

"Hey! Give it back, Batterbits!" he snarled, springing to his feet and making a few wild grabs at his copy of _The Caliosteo Gazette_. "Touchy" was Dina's only comment as she slinked off.

Absentmindedly, she wandered down the beach. Pauleen had woken up early to go fetch Joe Wildwest's fabled submarine, and without Dina to stop her from "fraternising with the enemy," she'd somehow convinced Todd to come with her. She and Rupert, on the other hand, were decidedly later risers, and when they had stumbled out of their tents at nine thirty or so their respective friends were already gone. And so the two probably-mortal enemies were stuck together, neither wanting to leave in case their friend turned up while they were gone.

Dina settled herself down on a weathered bench on the boardwalk and flipped to the horoscope part of the paper – the only part that didn't bore her to tears, though only because the little pictures and fancy font made it interesting to look at. Reading about how she and her fellow Tyrannicorns were going to keel over and die all the time wasn't very interesting at all. She flipped through the other entertainment pages tiredly, feeling her eyes glaze over as she slumped into the paper, scowling with each ink-tasting breath she took.

After what felt like hours but was probably only a few minutes, Pauleen's telltale head of pink hair began to come into view over the sand dunes. Dina took a deep, relieved breath before she got to her feet and ambled towards Pauleen's cries of "Hello, earthlings!" and the spluttering sound of Bottomsup's one and only tow truck (driven by countless generations of Steve McJunkers before the one they had now).

"Pauleen, hey!" yelled Dina, waving. She waggled her fingers and jumped up and down for maximum visibility. "What's up?"

"Nothing," replied Pauleen almost tersely, brushing past Dina. She was clearly trying to keep her tone lighthearted, but Dina knew better. The Digadig girl's face was flushed and her eyes were glittering. Dina grinned. Despite her sensitivity, Dina had never seen an honest tear fall from her friend's pretty green eyes in all the years she'd known her, but she was a world-class fake cryer. No matter what the situation, Pauleen always found an excuse to bring on the waterworks, and it almost always ended with her walking away with a fistful of cash and a free drink, to boot.

"Where's Rupert?" asked the pinkette, and Dina's face fell. _The crying didn't work this time, _she immediately thought, even though she hadn't the foggiest idea of what was going on. She put it down to women's intution, but she sort of knew that the only reason Pauleen would ever feel the need to ask her about Rupert was something had happened. Maybe she needed bait of some kind, and figured that a pompous, annoying jerk in designer clothes would work as well as any worm. Or perhaps she felt like giving someone a heart attack.

"Over there," Dina said, and Pauleen broke into a jog in the direction Dina had gestured towards.

"Rupert!" she called. "Rupert, how much cash do you have on you?"

"How much do you need?" he asked by way of response, snatching his newspaper from where Dina had left it and blinking bored eyes. Pauleen rolled her own eyes, huffed, "All of it," and grabbed Rupert by the arm, dragging him off to McJunker the Fourth and a probable shouting match.

Tired, bored, and desperate for an inteligent conversation, Dina stiffly turned to Todd, watching him try and fail to walk and hold his phone at the same time.

"It's not raining here, Ma," he was insisting into it. "I mean, it was raining, and now we're under a rain cloud, but I can see the sky and stuff! It's . . . cadet blue!" He paused. ". . . Steely blue." Another pause. "Grey." He stopped walking and shrugged, plastering a smile on his face. Dina mentally nodded her approval. It was a technique she'd used many times: even if the person on the other end couldn't see your smile, they could hear it in your voice, and you sounded a hundred per cent more done with their bull.

"Yeah, yeah, bye Ma," said Todd, and stuffed his phone into his pocket. Dina attempted a wave.

"Hi," she said. "Uh, er, um . . ." She racked her brain for something to say. "What's up . . . um . . ." _What's a good nickname for someone whose hobbies seem to consist mainly of repeating everything Rupert Wheatley says? _Finally, she remembered his blatantly obvious flirting with Pauleen over their first night's campfire. ". . . Ladykiller?"

Todd, it seemed, didn't need a smile to be a hundred per cent done with Dina's bull. The ginger sighed. It was going to be a long day.

* * *

At least the submarine was something to be positive about. It was shiny and yellow, with a spotless glass bubble in the front, showing a dashboard full of fancy-looking buttons and screens. A metal rigging dotted with lights and sonar-looking bits caged the submersible. Dina lifted her chin in pride and triumph.

"Uh, you guys," drawled Rupert, "I hate to burst your bubble . . ."

"Oh, you always do, Pretty Boy," said a flippant Dina, leaning forward to admire her reflection in the dome, frowning at her contorted appearance and smiling after a new coat of her favourite black lipstick.

". . . but the submarine only has three seats," continued the catlike boy through gritted teeth. Dina, who'd known this well before they all started, laughed.

"Oh, Pretty Boy," she said with a smirk, spinning around, waving her hand. "We already have this all planned out."

"Todd will be our navigator, so he'll sit in the right-hand seat up front," giggled Pauleen, patting the small boy on the head. He blushed.

"I _am_ the only one who knows the coordinates of the ship," he admitted. Pauleen straightened her back.

"Dina's driving," she went on. Dina nodded. "She has this innate ability that lets her, like, drive _anything_." Pauleen tossed her hair. "She's almost as cool as I am. So she's in the left." With an eyeroll from Todd and a giggle from Dina, who was used to this behaviour, Pauleen went on. "And I'm their assistant, who just happens to also be in charge of food. That means I get to sit in the back."

Rupert, who had been nodding glumly up to that point, suddenly bugged out his eyes and crossed his arms. "What about me?" he demanded, stomping his foot petulantly.

"What do you mean?"

"There are three seats, and you've all taken them!"

"You could always stay behind," offered Dina, but Pauleen and Todd had let her have far enough fun already. Begrudgingly, Rupert and Dina agreed to their respective friends' proposition to let him sit on the floor with their sleeping bags and coats as pillows of sorts.

And they were off.

* * *

It turned out, Todd didn't know the exact coordinates of what they were looking for. He had one, and then he had an approximate. And so the four little Fossil Fighters spent their four first days of air mucking about everywhere from the Continental Shelf to the some of the shallower hot water vents. Dina filled three spiral notebooks with drawings and detailed descriptions of the stranger sea life she saw, but she was the only one who seemed to be having any fun at all. Pauleen – Pauleen, who weighed a hundred pounds at 5'7" and had been a model since she could walk and smile at the same time – had single-handedly finished two party-size chip bags on their first night, Todd had almost jumped out the rescue hatch to chase after a shark on their second, and Rupert had spent the entirety of their third curled up around Dina's ankles, his hips digging into her bare feet until they were bruised and insulting her until he was veritably hoarse.

Finally, on what Dina's glow-in-the-dark watch informed her was the evening of their fourth day under the sea, their sonar slowly began pinging. Four jaws dropped and eight eyes widened as all four of the intrepid Wheatley School honour students crowded around the little black and green display on their dashboard, watching the little blinking blip draw closer and closer to their sub.

"The ship," Dina breathed. She was the first to react, breaking the spell as she clambered out of her seat and began tugging her wetsuit on over her romper and sweeping her hair up with a multitude of pins so she could fit her diving helmet on her head. "Come on, you guys!"

"_Muh_," managed Todd after a solid sixty seconds, his eyes locked on the pirate ship slowly coming into view over a stretch of coral reef.

"Oh, my gosh," whispered Pauleen. She, too, was transfixed. Huffing despite her euphoria, Dina pushed up her face mask and turned to the last member of their group.

"Oh, no," he said, tearing his wide yellow eyes away from the archaeological wonder playing out in front of him. "I'm not going out there. My . . . my therapist says I need a full fourteen hours of sleep every night."

"That certainly didn't stop you from staying up until dawn last night," Dina protested childishly. "Besides, why do you even need a therapist?"

"No reason," Rupert scrambled to say, and certain he was lying, Dina grabbed him by the hand and dragged him over to their pile of diving equipment, kicked a diving helmet over to him.

"_Come on_," she said, and reluctantly, Rupert zipped up his wetsuit and jammed his helmet on over his face, which was inexplicably flushed a pinkish colour that clashed awfully with his silver-white hair. Dina, however, was not one for pondering and she shoulder-checked the hatch as she wrestled it open, then leaped out into the water.

It was cold at the bottom of Bottomsup Bay. Cold and dark. The only light Dina and Rupert had were the searchlights of their submarine, but after ninety-six hours of constant use, they were dimming by the second.

Luckily, Dina didn't need lights. She hadn't gone more than ten meters before she tripped over a large, metal rock-esque object with one of her clumsy flipper feet. She dropped to her knees and squinted at the object, running her gloved hands along the surprisingly smooth edges and shaking it. It didn't budge. She waved Rupert over.

"What . . . " she heard him ask, but Rupert seemed to have a cat's eyesight as well as their freakish vertical pupils and he knelt down across from Dina and placed his own hands on the object, his eyes even wider than they'd been when the four of them had first seen the ship.

"It's a treasure chest," he said, and the smile in his voice wasn't the mocking, fake one Dina used when she really wanted to hang up on someone. It was the smile of a person who'd just found a treasure chest on a field trip.

Some sort of unspoken agreement passed between the two Fighters and they both seized one of the rust-encrusted handles on either side of the metal chest and started swimming as fast they could back towards their submarine.

The hatch was flung open for them, and the faces that met them were worried and scared – Dina figured that Pauleen and Todd must have assumed that something must have gone terribly wrong if they were back so soon. Wordlessly, Rupert thrust forward the box, and as Dina slammed the hatch shut she could feel the fear evaporate from the air.

Chatter bubbled up as soon as Dina and Rupert had their helmets off, and it grew louder and louder the longer it went on. Dina couldn't help but smile. There hadn't been a lot of talking the last few days, unless you counted whispered insults and demands for more chips.

It quieted down when Dina had gotten enough rust off the padlock to jimmy it open with one of her hairpins. Slowly, she lifted the heavy lid of the chest and closed her eyes in anticipation as she reached into the box and found . . .

. . . another box.

"Oh," she said, briefly crestfallen, but she refused to be deterred. It was fully logical to seal the actual treasure in another, more waterproof chest, in case it did fall overboard – think of the waste if everything inside were to rust! So she stuck her hairpin in this box's completely un-rusted lock and forced it open.

"OK, you get the first look, Pauleen," Dina decided. Pauleen had zero problems with this and took the slightly smaller (but still very large) chest from her friend's hands and placed it in the middle of the floor. Then she squealed at the top of her lungs.

"Look! Look, look!" she cried, dipping her hands into the box and pulling them out in a mess of tulle and lace. "Petticoats!"

Dina didn't know what a petticoat was, but they looked fantastically entertaining. She grinned and fluffed the fabric in Pauleen's hands a few times before kicking the chest over to Todd, who stuck his entire upper body into the treasure chest and came out with a basket full of yarn and small crocheted animal figures, smiling broadly. Next was Rupert, who immediately fell in love with a red silk cravat and a matching abalone pin (proclaiming it matched his lacrosse jersey perfectly, and what with their petticoats, crochet, and general Dina-ness, respectively, nobody crossed him). Then the chest came back around to Dina, and she closed her eyes, reached in, and pulled out a feathery fan and a feathery boa, which were quite possibly even more wonderful than the petticoats.

And so it continued, with everyone kicking the probably priceless antique chest around the floor of their submarine and laughing uncontrollably at its treasures. Dina found a diary and Todd unearthed a multitude of ladies' undergarments that hadn't seen the light of day for two hundred years. Pauleen topped even that with a bottle of something possibly alcoholic and probably scandalous for the owner of the chest to have owned way back when, and then Rupert found a stack of highly embarrassing love poems to a one Lord Nigel Scatterly, who was (_Gasp!_) an intellectual.

Finally, the chest made its final few rounds and Dina came to her last turn. She tossed a trailing end of her boa over her shoulder and pulled a stack of leather-bound journals from the dusty bottom of the box. Her fellow adventurers looked bored at this find, but the orange-haired girl refused to be deterred. She set aside most the journals aside for her own bedtime reading and held one up to the light. She noticed a slight gap in the pages, so she flipped the book over and shook it out, hard. A small, faded, sepia photograph fluttered to the floor.

She picked it up and turned it over, studying the portrait. The photo portrayed a frowning girl with Dina's thin eyes and lips, along with long hair in masses of frizzing ringlets framing her face and a lacy hat plopped jauntily upon her bony, angry face.

"Who's that?" Todd asked. Dina flipped the photo over and raised her eyebrows at the name.

"Felicity-Jane Clarke the Second," Dina read. Then something clicked in her brain. "Why . . . she's my great-great-great-great grandmother!"

* * *

**AN: Ooh, a grandmother! I'm very sorry for a boring chapter, you guys, and I'm even more sorry for how long it took. I've just been really busy lately! Nevertheless, hope you thought it was kind of enjoyable! Katie out.**


	6. Stupid, Stupid

**AN: I'm so sorry I haven't updated in so long! I've just been so busy! Anyway as you already know it's Kaitlyn here with another chapter of everybody's favourite Fossil Fighters marine biology story. Actually, I think it's the ****_only _****one . . . nonetheless, thank you all for reading and reviewing, and as always Fossil Fighters isn't mine.**

* * *

"Oh my gosh," panted Dina, sitting bolt upright in her sleeping bag, clammy fingers clutching at the fabric. Her eyes flicked to her reflection in the shiny, shiny floor, and she grimaced. She was never a pretty sight in the mornings, but after this dream, she looked absolutely terrible, with wide eyes and not a drop of blood in her gaunt, drawn face.

"What?" asked Pauleen, who always looked like she'd stepped out of a shampoo commercial in the mornings.

"I dreamt," said the ginger in a shaky voice, "that Jaewon and I both grew up to become famous and then we had a meeting where he turned into a bug and ate my face."

"Oh my gosh," said Pauleen, then, "who's Jaewon?"

"Jaewon," Dina replied, tucking her legs beneath her and fumbling about for a hair band. "You know, that kid in our fourth grade class who always tried to stick worms up people's noses."

"He's in my class," Rupert piped up from Dina's chair. Said girl, who wasn't the brightest in the mornings, either, and hadn't the slightest idea which members of the crew she hated and which ones she did mani-pedis with, scrambled to the seat next to the cat-eyed heir's perch and widened her eyes.

"Does he still stick worms up people's noses?" she wanted to know.

"Yeah," said Rupert idly, taking advantage of Dina's oblivion and putting his feet up on "her" dashboard. "He did Todd a few weeks back."

Pauleen looked apalled. "And you didn't intervene?"

Rupert shrugged nonchalantly. "I couldn't have. I wasn't even there at the time; I was in detention."

"For what?"

"Sticking worms up people's noses."

Even Dina, who barely knew her own name at that moment, shook her head. Rupert sucked in his cheeks and awkwardly said, "So . . . Dina. Your gran was pretty cool."

Her eyes flicked from the dark eddies of water outside their reinforced glass windshield to the book in Rupert's hands, and her jaw dropped. "Hey!" she said. "That was my prize from the box!"

"Well, maybe you shouldn't have been careless and left it out!" he shot back, clutching the journal to his chest like a petulant child with a "borrowed" doll.

"Maybe _you_ shouldn't take things that aren't yours!"

"Everything's mine!" Rupert paused for a moment and furrowed his eyebrows. "Uh, I mean, maybe you should learn to share!"

They glared at each other, cold yellow eyes locked onto colder brown ones. They stood still for a moment, teeth gritted, and fists clenched, before Dina lunged for her great-times-four grandmother's journal and Rupert spun out of her reach, leaving her to ram into the wall headfirst. He, in turn, stubbed his toe. She stuck her tongue out at him.

Pauleen ambled off to fall back asleep with her face suspiciously close to Todd's. It was going to be a long morning.

Dina noted that she had been having a lot of those lately.

* * *

It turned out that Rupert, fortunately for his ego and unfortunately for Dina's own, had been right, her grandmother had been cool. Felicity-Jane had been the assistant to the navigator on Captain Woolbeard's ship ("So it _was_ his boat!" a triumphant Todd had shouted, but that part of their adventure was starting to feel forgotten), but her job consisted mostly of scaring any slackers into doing their work doubly efficient for half their salary and keeping prisoners in line with the multitude of muskets and knives that she kept in her skirts.

According to her diary, the Scatterly persona Felicity-Jane was madly in love with was a prisoner she tended to be a "wee bit nicer" to, but the Fossil Fighters, giggly though they were, had practical mindsets and ended up shutting the diary and opening a few of the more official-looking journals, whose spines were straight and whose pages, though clearly dog-eared and covered in glue, paper clips, and spilled ink, were all present, lined up neatly and colour-coded in some manner.

Dina lifted the cover and flipped past the first few pages of ownership clarifications and "if found please return to"s until she reached a full-colour, gruesome picture of a large mosasaur, resplendent in bright green ink, tearing apart the seemingly lifeless body of some other unfortunate marine reptile.

"Ew," said Pauleen. The others heartily agreed.

"What is that thing?" asked Todd. Dina flipped back to the cover again and squinted at the spidery writing on the little title sqaure.

"It's called a Tylosaurus," she pronounced after a minute.

"Tylosaurus proriger. Discovered by Edward Drinker Cope in 1872 but some say it was discovered at an earlier date. Predatory marine lizard from the late Cretaceous period," said Rupert almost immediately, as if someone had pressed a button or pulled a string in his back. Dina furrowed her eyebrows at him.

"How did you . . . " she began, but Rupert just shrugged aside the comment, saying, "Sorry, I can't help it, I always end up doing that."

"Well, let's see what Granny has to say about these Tyler Saurus Pro-somethings," Pauleen suggested. The others agreed with her again and Dina filpped past the drawing, sitting back in her chair and reading the first journal entry aloud.

It was what she'd expected. The first few lines were notes on the Tylosaurus akin to what Rupert had precisely said: that the mosasaur, an animal similar to the monitor lizards of today, had terrorised the seas of the late Cretaceous period and eaten a great many unfortunate plesiosaurs. There were a few crossed-out names for what Dina supposed was the Tylosaurus the journal starred, but she payed no mind to it, knowing that Edward Drinker Cope had been a brief prisoner onboard Captain Woolbeard's ship and assuming Felicity-Jane had been talking with him.

The next pages bore a map. Like the drawing of the Tylosaurus it was done up in ink colours too bright to be accurate, and like all the maps Dina had ever seen from the 1800s it was not entirely geographically accurate either. However it was obviously a map of the Caliosteo region. The map had a large red X marking a coast of sorts slightly north of the Bottomsup area. In spidery writing it proclaimed the spot the X marked was "important" and also "secret."

There were a few more entries like the first, and the gang was getting a bit bored, when they came across several torn pages and angry, all caps writing saying,

_"Oh, stupid Cope, and stupid, stupid, stupid Nigel Scatterly! I work myself near to death to find the stupid Tylosaurus (a horrible name) and as soon as the dig is finished they take everything and pass the discovery off as their own. I am going to murder them. That lizard is my discovery! If anybody finds this journal, see to it the truth comes out."_

This sparked quite the discussion. Dina reckoned it was a ruse and Rupert just critiqued Felicity-Jane's handwriting. Todd was all over it. And Pauleen, for once, was thinking rationally: if it really was true, the map must have been to the dig site. The earth couldn't have shifted too much in two hundred years, and Bottomsup Bay's currents weren't strong enough to do too much lasting damage to the area.

"Just think," she stressed. "There still ought to be more fossils there, she said so in the notes. There's never been a Tylosaurus Dino Medal before; if we bring a complete fossil to the National Fossil Centre they can probably make one. And you know what happens to people when they bring in fossils for new Medals? They get rich."

"Ooh," said Dina. "Rich is good."

"It is," Pauleen agreed. "So let's try and be rich, you guys! We have a map. I don't think it'll take us long to get to the site marked on it."

* * *

It actually did take the gang quite a while to get there, but it would later be decided that was entirely the fault of a lack of gas, an incompetent driver, and a shortage of food. For even though the driver was very competent, if her boasts were to be believed, and the gas would have definitely gotten them within walking distance of the X and they still did have some canned vegetables left, none were about to admit they may have been wasting their time with a project they'd gotten out of a diary. So Dina was held responsible and they spoke no more on the matter.

The dig site was barren. Desolate. The scrubby forest they could see on the horizon seemed to have thinned out miles away from the cliff where they stood and after those sorry trees there wasn't a speck of vegetation to be seen. Just rocks, rocks, and more rocks.

"Look at it this way," Todd suggested with a weak smile. "Most of those rocks probably have fossils in them!"

Rupert shot him a withering glance. "But does it have the kind of fossils we're looking for?" That wiped the smile right off Todd's face.

Dina shoved them away from each other. "Shut up, you two— hey, what's that?"

"What's what?" Pauleen wondered. Dina cocked her head and listened intently. After almost a full minute, she heard it again: a faint yell and a clatter of metal on stone.

"That," said Dina.

"Oh," said Pauleen.

They all gathered up their things and set off down the cliff, in the direction of the noise. Rupert supplied them with a great many disturbing theories as to what the noise may have been and seemed to find great pleasure in watching Todd go paler and paler with each one.

He was in the middle of one about an evil schoolteacher-turned-clown when the same yell interrupted him, only far louder and clearer this time. Dina stiffened and looked over the cliff to pinpoint the origin of the noise . . . to see more guns than she could count pointed right back at her!

"Um, guys," she stammered. "I . . . we . . . look," she finished, and when they did Pauleen fell dead away in a faint and Todd vomited on Rupert's shoes. The white-haired boy's jaw, already slack with shock, fell even more. He stared at the purple-clad people with guns and his expression grew scared.

"Who are these people, rich boy?" asked Dina in a shaky undertone. "You seem to recognise them."

He swallowed. "Remember how that paper mentioned the BB Bandits?"

"Yeah?"

"That's them."

* * *

**AN: Le gasp! Why are the BBs there, what do they want, and why can't I write. Um. I don't know.**

**I hate to say it but my life is super duper hectic right now, and I think I have to put this on break! I don't want people to have to wait so long just to get a boring chapter like this. I'd rather put time and consideration into my writing. So I'm pressing pause for a while. I'm very sorry.**

**Er . . . Katie out.**


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